The stream was warm where it slid over black stone, as if the earth beneath it still remembered fire.

  A husband and wife—unbound, unregistered, unknown to the neat maps of the Concord—sat knee-deep in

  the water and watched their child slap at minnows with delighted, clumsy hands. The boy never said a word.

  He didn’t have to. His laughter was in his breath, in the way his shoulders shook, in the way he stared with

  whole-body attention at everything the world offered him.

  Far up the ridge, the volcano made a sound like a door in a storm—one long, grinding groan—and then the

  sky split.

  Ash rose in a column so tall it looked like a second mountain growing in fast motion. Lightning snarled

  inside it, blue-white veins crawling through the darkness. The parents stood at once, instinct and terror

  turning them into mirrors of each other. They reached for the boy at the same time.

  A rock the size of a cartwheel—glowing at its edges—fell through the ash like a slow, inevitable thought.

  It struck where they stood.

  There was no scream. There wasn’t time for one. The world went bright, then brutally dim, as the ash cloud

  swallowed daylight and the only light left was the storm inside the plume.

  The boy froze in the stream. For a heartbeat he stared at the empty place where his parents had been, as if the

  world had performed a magic trick and he was trying to catch the method. Then he climbed out of the

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  water—small hands sliding on wet stone, bare feet seeking purchase—and the ash found him.

  It clung because he was damp. It pasted itself to his hair, his cheeks, his eyelashes. In seconds he looked like

  a statue dragged from a ruin.

  He turned toward the sound of sirens. Toward shouting. Toward motion.

  Toward people.

  The evacuation line was chaos made orderly by desperate practice: civil servants in neutral uniforms

  shouting directions; drones lifting the injured; pods swallowing families and spitting them toward higher

  ground. A man in a short-sleeve civil service shirt—his rank pips catching lightning—scooped the silent

  child without pausing to wonder why a school-age kid wore no uniform at all.

  “You—hospital,” the man barked at a hovering rescue drone, and slapped the boy onto the cargo cradle as if

  he were another stretcher.

  The drone rose, banking hard through the ash.

  For a few seconds the boy saw everything from above: the river ribboning away, the fleeing line of pods, the

  ragged edge where the wildlands met the first maintenance corridors of the pagan transport spine.

  Something hit the drone—a piece of hot debris, a shockwave, a glitch in the air itself—and the cradle jerked.

  The boy slipped.

  He did not scream. The ash stole sound, and maybe he had never learned the habit.

  He fell, turning slowly, the world wheeling: lightning, darkness, the hard geometry of an access shaft

  opening like a mouth beneath him.

  Then there was only black.